'I believe it to be the trend that is going to have the greatest impact on the English language in the 21st century," linguist David Crystal once wrote of the internet, and certainly it has proved to be an area of rich lexical change.

The meanings of well-known words (bookmark, surf, spam, web) have shifted dramatically, while our vocabularies have expanded to accommodate new ones. The lower-case is in ascendance, @ has flourished, the full stop has been reinterpreted as the "dot" and entire trends have been refreshed by the prefix "cyber". Here are some of my favourite internet contributions to the language:

Friends An accumulation of people you found on the internet.

;alskdjf Used to fill space and waste time, often spotted on social networking sites.

404 Error message arising when a file is not found; also suggests general cluelessness.

ROFL Rolling on the floor laughing, or LMAOROFL (Laugh My Ass Off Rofl).